you will keep it to yourselves and subordinate it to your own selfish inclinations, the result must be that you lose it eventually. Surrender it then to me, this present life, (psuché,) and I will prolong it to an eternal life" (zoe). (John xii. 25.) Now, to the popular apprehension, this argumentum ad hominem, or appeal to the instincts which are common to us all, is suppressed, perverted, hoodwinked, and stultified, by the unfortunate treatment which our authorised translators have adopted in reference to the key-word of the discourse, changing it abruptly into "soul," with the view apparently of enhancing the solemnity of the passage, but really with the result just stated. The discourse is all about "life," and our estimate of it; but in presence of the vulgar medieval notions about souls as distinct from life, the popular mind is, by the aforesaid change, drawn away to another theme; and the idea seems suggested (as, in fact, it is often enforced from the pulpit), that every man carries about with him something called a soul which is intrinsically more valuable than the whole world. An endless amount of sermonising has been poured forth to fortify this romantic position; as though the whole object of the discourse were to prove the infinity and eternity of the human "psyché," instead of the very opposite fact. This is another illustration of the difficulties which commentators encumber themselves withal, when they think to improve the inspired text. Afraid to let the record speak for itself lest our poor fellow-men should misinterpret it, we take upon ourselves to mistranslate it,—a form of delusion which may well be expected to recoil with disastrous effect upon the perpetrator, be he doctor, archbishop, or archangel. "THE FAMILY IN HEAVEN." "For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named." (Ephesians iii. 14, 15.) The construction of this passage is by many supposed to indicate that the whole family of the redeemed are named Christians after Christ, and moreover that a large portion of them have reached heaven before the resurrection ;-as the hymn gives it :— "Let saints below in concert sing With those to glory gone, "One family, we dwell in him, And similar strains without number might be added, from religious writers of every kind. It will be well, therefore, that our readers be fully assured that the passage, so constructed, is a forgery; and that in its original shape it conveys no such meaning. All the oldest authorities agree in presenting it without the words " of our Lord Jesus Christ ;" and it is noticeable that the very paranomasia of the sentence is hostile to the theory of "the family" reflecting the name of Christ. The correct reading will therefore stand thus," For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father (pater), from whom every family (patria) in heaven and on earth is named," &c., "every family" being preferable to "the whole family." From which it will be evident that this text at least gives no sort of countenance to the notion that any persons called Christians have already attained celestial bliss. It has been urged that "the great cloud of witnesses encompassing us about" of Hebrews xii. 1, is an expression pointing to the worthies catalogued in the previous chapter, as being still alive, and from their seats in glory looking on and watching our career;-a mistake this, produced by reading witness-bearers in the sense of spectators. It is true that in modern language, to witness a thing is to see it, but formerly it only meant to bear testimony to the fact. The Old Testament heroes, the apostle is simply reminding us, have borne their testimony to the power of faith. Fortified by such testimony, let us do the like. Lorrespondence. THE EARTH A GLOBE AND A shippers of science (to carry out PLANET. DEAR SIR,-I am one who eagerly looks for the monthly arrival of the RAINBOW, because monthly it brings me matter for thought, and food for the spirit. I also feel deeply indebted to that magazine for the bold way with which it has handled many deep subjects, and has dispersed many dominant delusions. Judge, then, my surprise and grief at reading your views on astronomy, in answer to the question on the miracle in Joshua x., where you state your disbelief in Newtonian astronomy, and your belief that the earth is a plane, and the sun about 3,000 or 4,000 miles off! Before I enter on the Biblical objections, I will plead, first, for science, "goddess of short memory," though you call her. Science, real science, cannot be wrong. Science means knowledge. One may think one knows something, and be mistaken; but one only knows what is right. But what is science? A knowledge of facts, God's facts; for God is the doer of all that is done in all his universe. But the wor your metaphor) may be wrong, may contradict one another. True; and the first steps in any branch of science are stumbling, bungling, and their history not much better than a record of failure, when, groping in the dark, they "felt after" truth. Honour to those who took them! Let no one ridicule their attempts! But some sciences are distinguished from others by the appellation of "exact." An exact science is one which does not admit of controversy,-where there is no room for opinion; but where the truth, once discovered, is obvious. Of the exact sciences the chief is mathematics, in all its branches. The simplest branch of mathematics is arithmetic; the simplest rule of arithmetic is addition. Addition says that two and two make four. This admits of no controversy. If one should say, "Two and two make five," and another, "Two and two make three," their reasoning would be attributed to madness. There is another branch of mathematics, called trigonometry, i. e., measurement of triangles. By trigonometry we calculate the distances of distant objects, as a tower, a mountain, without actually going over the ground with a chain. By trigonometry, when the tunnel under the Alps was to be bored, were the engineers enabled to begin at both ends at once, and to meet in the exact middle, not an inch wrong. By this same trigonometry the stars' distances are measured, and their orbits tracked. You, sir, may not know much mathematics, nor do I, but have just gone so far as to know of myself, and not by others, that what I have hitherto advanced is true, absolutely true, everlastingly true. You may possibly not know any mathematics; but, in that case, your opinion (excuse me) is as worthless as mine would be on a question of music. When, the other day, a friend said, "They sang very badly in church to-day," I replied, "I am sorry for it; but I didn't know it till you told me; for I am almost without the musical faculty, and can't tell a false note." But music is a science, my ignorance notwithstanding; and mathematics is a science, your ignorance notwithstanding. Also, as my opinion is worthless on a question of music, so is your opinion also worthless on a question of mathematics. But what about the miracle? Did the earth really stop on her axis? It may be so. But then that stupendous miracle required one more so to hinder everything upon the earth flying off at a tangent into space (for proof of which, dynamics, another branch of mathematics, must be studied) and God is usually economical of miracle-power. The other Joshua, son of Sirach, takes it so (Ecclesiasticus xlvi. 1, 4): "Jesus the son of Nave was valiant in his wars. . . . Did not the sun go back by his means? and was not one day as long as two?" But to this authority I don't feel bound to submit. Some, again, think that there was an extraordinary appearance in the heavens, which the beholders took for the sun: a refraction, or mock sun. But there are serious astronomical difficulties against this interpretation. An ingenious interpretation was offered by one Mr. Jacob Bryant, in his book called, "Observations upon some Passages in Scripture which the Enemies of Religion have thought most obnoxious, and attended with difficulties not to be surmounted" (London, 1803); in which he contends that there was a temple of the sun at Gibeon, and one of the moon in the valley of Ajalon, and that Joshua, in Jehovah's name, adjured the sun, their god, to be silent (the literal rendering) to the prayers of his worshippers praying for success at Gibeon, and the moon to be the same to hers at Ajalon. He sup- · poses the following to be the words of the sacred text, as originally written. Joshua x. 11, 12, 15: "And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were going down to Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died. There were more which died with hailstones than they which the children of Israel slew with the sword. Then spake Joshua to the Lord, in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel: Sun, upon [high place of] Gibeon, be silent; and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And Joshua returned, and all the people with him, unto the camp at Gilgal.' (The moon being mentioned in a vale shows that it could not be the luminary in the heavens.) The purport and ultimate design of this address, though couched in a small compass, seems to be this:-God of all victory, may thy people, from this instance, be confirmed in their duty, and worship thee alone. And may the Gibeonites and their confederates, by this display of thy power, be weaned from their idolatry, and see the inferiority of their base deities. May the sun, whose oracular temple stands on Mount Gibeon, be dumb; and the moon, whose shrine is in the valley of Aia-lon, be equally silent. their oracles cease for ever." May Verses 13 and 14 he takes as inserted by a copyist, and quoted (as they certainly are) from the Book of Jasher. Now, this Book of Jasher, or the Upright, was probably a collection of poems about Jewish heroes, and we have no reason to suppose it inspired, any more than the books called Apocrypha. [*] If I have thrown any light upon the subject, or, better, shall lead others, and Hebrew scholars,which I am not,-to turn their attention to the subject, I shall be satisfied. Dear sir, I pray you not to sneer at science, for, by so doing, you are sneering against her Master. And don't champ against the phrase, "The Bible was not sent to teach science;" for assuredly it was not sent for that purpose, but to [* Our correspondent's other remarks may go for what they are worth; but we cannot allow the words he has underlined to pass unchallenged. We love true science, and know as much of mathematics as enabled us to cross the pons asinorum safely, and without help, many years ago; but we will have none of the "science," falsely so called, that contradicts the word of GOD, or denies its inspiration to evade a difficulty. We teach, and mean to teach, that Scripture contradicts the false in science; and, in doing this, we are the true friends both "of the young" and the old.-EDITOR.] teach us how to please God: science we must get by working those brains which God has given us. As to those texts which you quote, I will only reply by saying that the sacred writers spake in a "tongue understanded of the people;" and even modern astronomers do the same. The term "sunset " has not yet suffered sunset. The subject is important; for, once teach that Scripture contradicts science, and you ipso facto scare away a whole generation of the young from revelation, and virtually "hand them over to Satan." I myself care not for myself whether this or any other difficulty can be solved; but to young and unstable souls these may be vital questions; and, if we offend one of these little ones, it had been better for us not to have been born. Yours very truly, CYRIL A. GREAVES, B.C.L., Chaplain to the Beds. Middle-Class School, and Chaplain to the Beds. Militia. THE EARTH A PLANE AND AT REST. DEAR SIR,-It is something to thank God for to be one of the rank and file under such a leader; and hence, as it occurs to me that you may not be aware of the views of the celebrated Dr. Wolff respecting the earth, that my apprising you may be of some service. Dr. Wolff firmly believed the world to be a plane, the sun to move, the earth to stand still; and he never hesitated to avow his convictions. In his "Travels and Adventures," he says:-"Joseph Wolff must also give his opinion as to the application. of science to religion. He considers Galileo and Copernicus to be downright heretics; and he believes that the sun walks and that the earth stands still. And their heresy is not at all so universal as people suppose, for all the Hutchinsonians deny it; Archbishop Nares denies it; all the eastern Churches deny it." He also alludes to the spread of ideas subversive to Scripture: "Wolff trembles at the approach of that time, and come it will." Yes, the struggle is imminent ! a Bible said to contain a false account of creation; a Bible said to contain a false origin of man (the Darwinian being the true); a Bible with a false account of the deluge (for only if the earth be flat with raised edges, as a plate, could the mountains be submerged); a Bible with a false theory of astronomy; a Bible full of lies, according to science; is well worthy to be banished from the schools, and will eventually be rejected from all educational schemes for certain. Yes, the struggle is imminent ! A compulsory system of registration already in force, a compulsory vaccination attendant thereon, and a compulsory attendance at schools where theories are taught utterly subversive of Scriptural statements, seem to me the beginning of the end, when no man shall be able to buy or sell save he who has the mark of the beast. And to my mind the machinery is as perfect as disastrous: it begins compulsorily with the young. I have long marked the tendencies of modern legislation :-compulsory every one; promising liberty, yet forging fetters for all. But to resume. A few ideas of my own regarding the earth, and its supposed travels through space, may not be unacceptable to you. 1st. Dictionaries tell us that centrifugal force is a quality acquired by all bodies in motion, the housemaid trundling her mop being a common illustration. Granting, therefore, for argument's sake, the truth of the earth's rotundity and velocity in motion, the onus of accounting for the breach of the law above referred to, lies with those who assert such rotundity and velocity. The common remark, "No law without an exception," is not a satisfactory reply. I have never heard any other reply half so sound. The waters ought to fly with awful speed in all directions, and the very ground vanish in clouds of dust, for the super-incumbent weight of the atmosphere avails not to counteract the centrifugal force of the trundled mop, nor could it avail to counteract the centrifugal force of a trundled globe. 2nd. The vanishing point of the horizon on a globe does not coincide with the known results of ballooning. 3rd. We, in our offices here, use the dialling apparatus on the principle that the earth is flat. Everything is LEVELLED for. If the earth is round, then the whole course of surveys are wrong; and, just as in all other matters we judge of men by their actions instead of their words, so in this, if the earth be round, sections of the circle would be dialled for. I think, if you will make inquiry at the hands of practised civil engineers, you will learn that, whatever may be their belief regarding the form of the earth, they practise their art as if it were absolutely and everywhere flat, making no allowances whatever in their calculations to counteract the influence of the level (spirit level) which is attached to all dials. I am yours, with hearty regards, WM. NICHOLSON. Crown Offices, Coleford. SCIENTIFIC ASTRONOMY. DEAR SIR,-Glad indeed am I to read the "Protest," in this month's |